YASP - Yet another Sketchup Post

:smileyvery-happy:

Was doing some housekeeping on the 'puter and came across something that might prove helpful to some of you. While designing a deck for my in-laws, I needed a way to show them just how it was going to look on their lot and in relationship to their house. Because the city required a drawing showing their lot lines and placement of the deck, I already had their plat drawing from the city. It was a simple matter of scanning the drawing and importing it into Sketchup and resizing according to scale. Using the elevations from the plat drawing, I was able to slope the yard close to reality.

Next, I found a drawing of their floorplan on the developer's website and imported that into my drawing. After scaling that appropriately, I set out tracing out all the walls. A quick trip to the Google Sketchup 3D Warehouse provided me the doors, windows, appliances, fireplace, tv, bathroom fixtures, etc.

The result came out as this:

Some of the odd shapes out beyond the grass are just there to block identifying markings on the plat drawing.

You can go so far as to set the day of the year and time of day for your particular area in Sketchup and see how the shadows will fall.

Hope this inspires some of you to give Google Sketchup a try. It can be a valuable tool for visualizing any number of things around your house and property.

Ok Paul this one far out does all of your other Sketchup posts. I am in ahh every time you post any of your drawings.

I really wish I had the time to just set and play with it. I'm sure I would use it all the time for all of my woodworking plans that I draft out by hand. Back when I was in school that's all that they had was Drafting. I love doing it by hand but I think I would be ok with working with Sketchup if I knew how to work it like you do.

Thanks again for all of the inspiration that you give me and all of the other member here on the community.

So now I want to know did you actually end up making the deck or just the really cool plans for it?

Do you have any before and after pictures of the deck? I would love to see them. It looks like a really nice deck.

Well, we have something in common. I was an apprentice draftsman for a while. As for pictures, this particular deck is in a holding pattern. While it's been approved by the building department, the in-laws need for some new major appliances took precedence over building the deck. Hopefully in the late spring I can get started building and taking pictures. This deck is similar to another built a while back. Any pictures of that one are long since gone.

As for learning Sketchup, just like your drafting, the more you use it, the better you get. With practice comes speed.